What does the birth of babies whose embryos had gone through genome editing mean--for science
and for all of us? In November 2018 the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been
born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as
the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book Hank Greely a leading authority on law and
genetics tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences. Greely
explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did how he did it and how the public and other
scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention. The two babies
nonidentical twin girls were the first CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR Clustered Regularly
Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only
describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also
considers in a balanced and thoughtful way the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd
babies and more broadly from this kind of human DNA editing—germline editing” that can be
passed on from one generation to the next. Greely doesn't mince words describing He's
experiment as grossly reckless irresponsible immoral and illegal. Although he sees no
inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing he also sees very few good uses
for it—other less risky technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the
implications carefully before we proceed.
